Sev's silence about Catherine

aaron · 24 Jun 2008, 20:39 · from 2008-June.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: aaronsingleton at gmail.com (aaron)
Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2008 16:39:05 -0400
Subject: (urth) Sev's silence about Catherine
In-Reply-To: <4860AE4F.2090804 at gmail.com>
References: <BAY103-W36750528E05B20ABC9DB64D7A70 at phx.gbl>
	<4860AE4F.2090804 at gmail.com>
Message-ID: <ecbb2eb0806241339m78f27c2eg329cb980cdc0439 at mail.gmail.com>

This is a bit off subject, I know, but it does pertain to Katherine, at
least the one at Severian's raising ceremony.  It has always seemed to me,
even the first time I read Shadow, that Severian was deceived into thinking
that his beheading of Katherine was illusion using a wax head, stage blood,
fuligin cloth, and a clever device of some sort.  If you read the passage
(sorry, I am not close to my books just now) in TSotT I am speaking of, you
will notice that Sev goes out of his way to point out that the head is wax
and that there is a clever mechanism used to make it all appear real.  What
strikes me as strange is that Severian has, from his own admission, helped
to prepare the wheel and other props (one can assume) when he was a
apprentice, but seems unable to explain how they work (besides the wheel)
when he is raised.  There is also a short description of his sword meeting
resistance when it comes into contact with Katherine's neck.  Perhaps there
are other clues, but as I said, I am going from memory here, so...   Any
thoughts?

Aaron Singleton
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20080624/f307daa7/attachment.htm>

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net